By the Mayab Media Team
Your customers are already pointing their phone at things and searching. Until last month you had no clean way to see if any of that traffic landed on your site. Now you do, and most people won't even click the filter.
On September 24, 2026, Google added multimodal search reporting to Search Console. It's a small filter. It answers a big question: are people finding you with a camera instead of a keyboard?
What Google changed
According to the Google Search Central announcement, there's a new multimodal search type filter in the performance reports. It covers searches where someone uses an image to search. Google lists four sources:
- Google Lens
- Circle to Search on Android
- Image uploads to Google Search
- Chrome's right-click "Search this image" option
You can export the data like any other performance view. Google said it's rolling out globally, and you'll only see numbers if your site actually gets traffic from these queries. The same filter also appears in the generative AI features report, but for this piece we're focused on the regular search results report.
That's it. No new ranking factor, no new markup. Just visibility into a channel that was mostly invisible before.
Why this matters for revenue
Think about how people use Lens. They see a product in a store, on a friend's shelf, or in a social post. They point the phone at it. They want to know what it is, where to buy it, or what it costs.
That's a buyer. Not a researcher reading a 3,000-word guide. Someone with intent and a wallet.
So if you sell physical products, this filter tells you something your keyword reports can't. Same goes for businesses where the thing itself is visual: furniture, shutters and blinds, landscaping materials, fashion, food, home decor, art, auto parts. If your product photos are showing up for camera searches, you have a channel worth feeding. If they're not, and your competitors' are, you're leaking sales you never knew existed.
For service businesses the value is smaller, but not zero. A roofing company might see someone search with a photo of a damaged shingle. A landscaper might show up for a plant photo. Small numbers, high intent.
How to use it this week
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Open the filter and get a baseline. In Search Console, go to Performance, Search results, open the search type filter, and under Web pick "Multimodal" instead of "Text-based." Search Engine Roundtable reports this is brand new data that wasn't included in the web numbers before, so don't expect it to explain old traffic. Set the range to the full period since the filter appeared. Write down clicks and impressions. If it's empty, that's your answer for now. Check again in a month.
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Export pages, not just totals. Which URLs show up? We'd bet it's mostly product pages and image-heavy category pages. That tells you which content Google matches to photos.
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Look at the queries. Multimodal queries can read strangely because they come from an image plus maybe a few words. Still, they hint at what people think your product is. If the queries use words you don't use on the page, add them. People who search with a camera often don't know the product name. Your page should.
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Fix your product images. Google can only match what it can see and understand. Use original photos, not the same manufacturer images every other reseller uses. Show the product clearly, from multiple angles, on a clean background. Write descriptive file names and alt text that say what the thing actually is. Make sure images aren't blocked from crawling.
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Tie it to money. Visual search traffic means nothing if it lands on a page with no price, no stock info and no clear button. Check that the top multimodal landing pages have a visible price, availability, and a fast path to buy or request a quote. Then track those landing pages in your analytics so you can see if this traffic converts.
Our take
We like this update because it's honest data about a real behavior. People have been searching with cameras for years. Most businesses ignored it because they couldn't measure it. That excuse is gone.
Will it be a big channel for every site? No. For many local service businesses the numbers will be tiny. But for ecommerce and anything sold on looks, we think it's one of the most useful Search Console additions this year. Spend twenty minutes on it. If the data shows up, it'll pay for itself in better product photos alone.
The takeaway: if you sell things people can photograph, check the multimodal filter today and make your images worth matching.
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